Thursday, April 19, 2018

The truth about accents

A recent edition of my favourite magazine, Britain’s The
Spectator, included a travel article in which the writer had made a brief
stopover at Auckland.

She described New Zealand as “utterly draconian” about what
people are allowed to bring into the country. “I disembarked to dire warnings
of crippling fines for smuggling in food, seeds, plants or pets. It’s a brave
traveller who wanders in with a forgotten banana skin in their bag.”

She went on: “To my horror, I was pounced on
immediately. A guard grabbed my handbag, dragging it off my shoulder.
‘D’you hev food of eny kind in your beg?’ she demanded. ‘Boris [her bouncy
beagle] thinks you hev’.

“My bag was wrenched from my grasp, emptied out on to a
table, and given a thorough snuffle by Boris.”

I suspect a bit of journalistic exaggeration here. Granted,
our border protection people sometimes lack a bit of finesse. This is a hazard
of their occupation internationally. Customs and immigration people everywhere
have a way of making innocent travellers feel guilty, or at the very least
under suspicion.

But what particularly struck me was the writer’s mocking of
the New Zealand accent.

Before I go any further, a disclosure. I
cringe at the way many of my fellow New Zealanders speak.

The New Zealand accent is changing, and not in a pleasing
way. I reckon the time will come when people of my generation will struggle to
understand what millennials are saying.

Younger staff in cafes and shops are often incomprehensible.
They speak a dialect recogniseable only by their contemporaries.

On a recent Air New Zealand flight I winced at the strangled
pronunciation and grotesque, sing-songy vocal cadence of the 30-something woman
making the in-flight announcements. Our national airline leaves no stone
unturned in its efforts to recruit cabin crew who speak atrociously.

But here’s the thing. As a New Zealander, it’s my right – a
right of citizenship, you might say - to comment critically on the way we
speak. But when people of other nationalities make disparaging remarks about
the New Zealand accent, that’s a different story. I always feel my hackles
rise.

Why? Because it’s the sneerer’s way of asserting cultural
superiority.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the way
other nationalities speak, but it reveals more about the mocker than the
mocked.

The Brits still carry a lot of imperial baggage, and some
can’t help revealing their disdain for cultures that they once governed, and
which they still consider a bit primitive – like us, for example.

The United States-based TV host John Oliver is another Pom
who enjoys making fun of the New Zealand accent. The irony that has
escaped both Oliver and the Spectator writer is that their own country
is home to a wondrous assortment of bizarre regional accents and dialects, some
of them almost incomprehensible to outsiders.

This illustrates two truths about accents. The first is that
most human beings can’t help the way they speak, any more than Oliver can help
looking and sounding like a dork. Accents are markers of regional origin,
social class and education. They are part of a lifelong cultural conditioning
that starts at birth and over which most people have little control.

The other truth is that most national and regional accents
sound funny to outsiders and are therefore ripe for mockery. This is just as
true of a farmhand from the English West Country – or, for that matter, a Welshman or an Old Etonian with marbles in his mouth –
as it is of a biosecurity officer at Auckland Airport.

The British are not the only nationality who derive
amusement from the way New Zealanders speak. Australians do it too.

A recent example was when the now-disgraced former
Australian deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce was revealed as having dual citizenship
of Australia and New Zealand. This was the cue for much gleeful satirical
comment on Australian TV shows in which Joyce mysteriously acquired what was
presumably meant to sound like a New Zealand accent.

Sigh. Australian jokes about the Kiwi accent are as tedious,
predictable and infantile as the tired old ones about sheep. But who’s to say
that our accent sounds any more ridiculous to an outsider than the Australian
one?

Done without malice, mimicry of other accents can be funny.
The late Peter Sellers made a career out of imitating Hindus and Frenchmen –
something he would never get away with today. But the way the New Zealand
accent was described in the Spectator article had nothing to do with
humour.

It was a sneering putdown of a crude colonial – one,
moreover, who had the impertinence to subject the English journalist to the
inconvenience and humiliation of a bag check. How dare she!

It’s a sign of insecurity when one nationality tries to
build itself up by putting others down. The sooner people realise this, the
sooner the disparaging jokes about national accents will dry up.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.